by Revd Canon Neil Patterson, Vice-Dean of Bristol Cathedral and Chair of Together for the Church of England
A little while ago I heard for the first time of the 1995 Board for Social Responsibility report Something to Celebrate: Valuing Relationships in Church and Society. The person to whom I was speaking recalled this as being published at about the time when they were ordained, and as a good thing in its reflection on marriage and relationships, and they wondered what had happened to it. Immediately piqued and slightly unsettled to realise that this report existed, I set about investigating. It was easy enough to obtain a second-hand copy, but also very interesting to discover how it was received by General Synod, and to recognise the remarkable parallel, but different outcome, to the 2023 Archbishops’ Commission report Love Matters. 30 years have seen a sea-change in attitude that is much wider than the over-publicised divisions about homosexuality, and I offer this account as a relief to those of us weary of acting as the proxy for all Church debate around relationships and marriage.
You see, Something to Celebrate has an awful lot in common with Love Matters, although the more recent report curiously never mentions the former. Both explore the current nature of family life at length, drawing on a wide range of research to recognise the varied shape of families in England today. Both reports commend the quality of relationships rather than their specific form, and recognise that children can be raised well and successfully in different sorts of households. Both commend an open welcome by churches, and various aspects of state support for family life (speaking into rather different times for that). Critically for their reception, both reports deliberately shy away from particularly commending (heterosexual) marriage as the basis for family life. Both reports are long and thorough, and I commend reading them in full (Love Matters is here)
In public reception, though, the reports fared very differently. The publication of Something to Celebrate in June 1995 was greeted by newspaper headlines with variants of ‘Church backs living in sin’ and, by the time it came to be debated at Synod in November, there was clearly a substantial head of opposition, signalled also by the last-minute resignation of Alan Storkey from the Working Party after they declined to accept his more conservative minority report for inclusion. The Bishop of Liverpool therefore introduced the debate with a good degree of caution. I am not sure if this was normal Synod practice for the time, but the debate was structured as a single block of speeches, at the end of which both a motion to Take Note of the report, and a Motion of clauses, with proposed amendments which had been introduced earlier in the debate, were all voted on.
The tone was set decisively by George Carey as Archbishop, who thanked those who had worked on the report, but made it clear, to widely-reported applause, that he disagreed on the central point that there could be any equivalence between cohabitation and marriage. Other speakers – including, strikingly, Jeffrey John – criticised what they felt to be the weak theology of the report, but some defended it, including Jim Thompson as Bishop of Bath & Wells. The result was, very unusually, a strong division on the Take Note question, which went to a vote by Houses that registered the significant opposition (23-4; 164-60; 122-104) especially in the Laity.
The four-part motion offered already included a first clause to ‘strongly affirm…that marriage provides the proper context for sexual relationships and the bringing up of children,’ along with commendation of the report and its specific recommendations. This was presumably because there was already recognition of the need to adopt a more conservative position, and motions to remove this clause failed. An amendment by Pete Broadbent to include reference to the 1958 Lambeth Conference resolutions on marriage and family life passed, meaning that the final motion, passed 428-15, was clearly something of a repudiation of the liberal position expressed in Something to Celebrate. With customary lack of haste, the House of Bishops subsequently published in 1999 Marriage: A Teaching Document which represented something of an official crystallisation of that decision.
By contrast, Love Matters came out in an age when very little that the Church of England says attracts media attention. The chairs of the Commission, Professor Janet Walker and Bishop Paul Butler, plugged it by an article in the Church Times which drew a single hostile letter for the lack of focus on marriage, and a few disappointed conservative blogs flagged up the same point. But, perhaps deliberately, it did not garner much comment alongside the LLF hullabaloo, in spite of the obvious relevance of a report calling for the Church to value families in all their diversity. As Love Matters was not a Synod paper, it did not come for Take Note, but was presented by a motion for debate in February 2024, commending it across the Church, encouraging the Archbishop’s Council to make practical proposals, and Government also to act. Against these, a single amendment affirming the value of “marriage, especially when loving” was offered by Julie Maxwell.
The debate on the amendment was not extensive, but it was clear that Dr Maxwell represented the viewpoint held by Archbishop Carey and the strong majority of Synod in 1995, that any report about family life needed to uphold the place of marriage. The Bishop of Durham was happy to accept her amendment, and she was supported by Christopher Townsend, but opposed by Jo Winn-Smith, who argued that it was unavoidably discriminatory. The amendment was pushed to a vote by Houses by the Bishop of Manchester, and fell in all three (8-8-1; 61-81-5; 74-84-8). The debate ran overnight, and in the morning a full commendation of the report by Archbishop Justin was followed by further conservative speeches from members including Matt Beer and Prudence Dailey, concerned by the lack of clarity on marriage. The final vote was therefore also taken to Houses, but passed strongly in all three (23-0-0: 97-30-19; 97-38-12).
As noted above, it took the House of Bishops four years (fast work by their standards?) to produce Marriage: A Teaching Document in response to the Synod debate on Something to Celebrate. My suggestion is that the very different debate and outcome on Love Matters is an invitation to them to revisit their predecessors’ work of a generation ago, and to consider presenting a theology of human relationships which responds more imaginatively to the great diversity of family situations where love is found in England today, and which abandons the cult of an unreal idea of marriage that has dominated for too long.
Any thoughts?